Integral Profiles: Beena Sharma

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that "poor minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas." Integral minds, we might add, discuss all three.

In the Integral Profiles series, host Jeff Salzman sits down with some of today's most notable thinkers, teachers, and leaders, discussing the many ways they are catalyzing the Integral vision in their lives, in their hearts, and in their work. These men and women are collectively defining the leading edge of evolution in today's world, their thoughts and actions actively influencing the shape and scope of tomorrow's possibilities.

Beena Sharma brings significant international experience in facilitating leadership and organizational development training. She co- designs, implements and anchors large scale organizational change efforts, and is currently the head of Development and Training at Magellan, a major health organization. She contributes her expertise as a insightful facilitator and her mastery in polarity management to the LMF-intensives. Workshop participants admire her boundless energy, clarity, and deep, caring attention.

Jeff Salzman is lead teacher at Boulder Center for Integral Living as well as part of the founding circle. He is co-founder of CareerTrack Training, and has worked in adult education/transformation for twenty years. For three years Jeff worked side by side with Ken Wilber building the Integral Institute, an International center for Integral theory and application. A Divinity School dropout, he expects to graduate from the Religious Studies Department of Naropa University with a Masters Degree in Indo-Tibetan Studies. Jeff is devoted to the Integral worldview and to helping it arise in people's minds, hearts, bodies, and lives.

Educated in India

Here Beena talks about her own background and developmental journey, describing her experiences growing up in a culturally and politically divided India.  She also shares her own path to the Integral vision, which began with a passionate fascination with education and the process of learning, leading to Beena's involvement with one of the most cutting-edge educational programs in India.  From there she began to encounter much of the complexity that Integral theory was itself designed to resolve, accelerating her own growth through the spiral of personal and professional development.

Discovering Integral and Susanne Cook-Greuter

Here Beena describes how she first encountered Ken Wilber's Integral model, beginning with a serendipitous encounter with his book No Boundary in the bookstore.  She shares what originally "lit her up" about the Integral approach, feeling like she had finally found a system that attempts to explicitly honor and include all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the world, while simultaneously making room for her own full expression of being in the world.  She then talks about her work with Susanne Cook-Greuter, another Integral pioneer who is working to develop a finely-tuned measurement of ego-development.